Professional hairdressing salons are typically equipped with one or more hair dryers having a hood, an air heater and means for directing a flow of heated air to the patron's head to accelerate the drying process. The dryer air flow causes movement of hair and also dries hair at a rapid rate. These effects are not appropriate during certain hair processing procedures. As one example, hair tinting calls for the application of heat without physical disturbance of the hair and the solutions that are used in the process should not be rapidly dried up. Consequently, other items of equipment such as radiant heat lamps are used for hair processing operations of this type.
Use of separate dryers and heat lamps has an adverse impact on costs, space requirements and also complicates the hairdressing operations as the patron must move from one location to another or the hairdresser must move bulky equipment from one location to another. It would be advantageous to reduce the amount of equipment that is required for hairdressing operations and to do so without substantial structural complication of the remaining equipment. It would also be advantageous to make use of pre-existing hair dryers for other hair processing procedures without requiring complicated modifications of the structure of the dryers.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems discussed above.